What do you call a cross between Tinkertoys, K'Nex, Gears, wooden blocks and a plastic boat?

My friend Eric Rosenbaum and I are trying to find out. We're inspired by Golan Levin and Shawn Sims's Free Universal Construction Kit, which allows anyone with a 3D printer to connect previously-incompatible construction toys. We love that Golan and Shawn released his designs with a Creative Commons license, but 3D printers remain far too expensive for most poeple.

Would it matter if we could track the total sum of global prayer and compare hourly analytics on the spiritual attention of religious people around the world?

Last month, I spent a day discussing this and other questions with Andy Moore and James Docherty at the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which facilitates connections across student Christian movements in over 150 countries.

Citizen journalism and social media have become major sources for the news, especially after the Arab uprisings of early 2011. From Al Jazeera Stream and the NPR's Andy Carvin to the Guardian's Three Pigs advert, news organisations recognise that journalism is just one part of a broader ecosystem of online conversation. At the most basic level, journalists are following social media for breaking news and citizen perspectives. As a result, designers are rushing to build systems like Ushahidi's SwiftRiver, to filter and verify citizen media.

One reason I make things on the Internet is a strong belief in the original powerful idea behind the web itself: that links can radically transform the way we tell stories and experience the world. Today, I saw an amazing example of this, via Sarah Espiner, my former colleague at the Ministry of Stories.

If anything sums up this year's Knight MIT Conference on Civic Media, it was Joi Ito's argument for creativity and risk, encouraging us to pursue visions that we do not yet know how to describe. The Civic Media Conference is a new breed of gathering for networked thinking and doing: action research woven with creative diversity and energised by funding model innovation.

Part SXSW, part Barcamp, the conference combined hackdays, funding announcements, panel discussions, and stand-up storytelling. As a flagship demonstration of Ethan Zuckerman's vision for the emerging field of Civic Media, the conference was spectacular. But for Civic Media to flourish while bridging so many communities, this new ecosystem needs to foster stronger, more diverse ties.

This is a summary post. Each session gets one or two paragraphs, with the video embedded. Each section also has a link to amazingly comprehensive and detailed posts by our liveblog team. If any of these ideas interests you, the liveblog is the best place to find in-depth discussion.

Today, the Knight Foundation announced winners of the latest Knight News Challenge, which was focused on on Networks.

Knight Prototype Fund

The Knight foundation has just launched a prototype fund (Knight Challenge prototype fund), in an attempt to shorten the pace of grantmaking. The prototype fund takes 60 to 120 days and offers less than $50,000 dollars to help groups take an idea into prototype. The goal is to create a more iterative, innovative approach, funding 50-60 projects. The Jefferson Institute has received one of these grants to explore their Patchwork Nation data. University of Nebraska's drone journalism program has also received prototype funds.

Michael Maness and Joi Ito spoke to Elise Hu about Knight's vision for this fund.

Eilse Hu (@elisewho): How have you sought to innovate in this space?

Can high levels of interoperability lead to greater innovation? What would a theory of interoperability look like?

That's the question posed by the latest book by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser: Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems(amazon).

Today, we are hearing from Sugata Mitra, visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and Professor of Educational Technology at the school of education at Newcastle University (blog here). Mitra is best known for the "Hole in the Wall" computer learning systems in India (TED Talk) and the related educational philosophy, "Minimally Invasive Education."  My Media Lab colleage Sayamindu Dasgupta helped me blog Mitra's talk.